As a storyteller, you also don't want to make people feel like they're left out, like other people who have read the book have an interior knowledge of this show, and the degree of difficulty in watching it is much higher.

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

Lost is a mystery show, so I think that would be stripping the franchise of sort of its essential nature.

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.